"9.1 Without prejudice to its obligations under this Agreement or otherwise at law, Contractor must maintain, with a well-established insurer of good reputation, a public liability insurance policy covering each and every claim or series of claims originating from any cause of action occurring at the GP.""9.3 Contractor must maintain the required public liability insurance from the date of this Agreement and for two years following the termination of this Agreement. "

Suddenly all judges are required to keep liability insurance to work their GPs and keep it for at least two years after the event for some fucking reason.

"12.3 Contractor will not at any time during the Agreement, or within three (3) months of its termination, directly or indirectly entice away or try to entice away from tournamentcenter or its clients any employee of tournamentcenter working in a managerial, financial, technical, sales or marketing capacity who was employed by tournamentcenter or its clients at the date of such enticement or attempt and who was known to the Contractor by reason of or in connection with this Agreement."

This means that for 3 months after working one of their GPs, I cannot promote any competing tournament that happens to conflict with a Grand Prix like a PPTQ for example.

MaRo mentioned it, so our buddy Monty Ashley was finally able to reveal that he worked on the design team for Unstable, the only card set he ever participated in designing in his 13-odd years with Wizards.

We've known for years that he'd written the flavour text on a number of older cards (most of which are actually clever and/or amusing, unlike most flavour text. The example I always remember is Naya Battlemage), but this was pretty cool. He'd been sitting on the news for over five years and had no idea when, if ever, he'd be able to reveal it, so he's pretty excited himself. To say nothing of seeing actual cards he created in a real (well, "real") MTG set.

As it is, it's been long enough that he has no idea how much of his work will be in the set as printed, but he's supposed to tell us which cards are his once the spoiler hits. Might get some other interesting stories too!

The more I've thought about it, the more I like it. The terminology we've had for more than a decade now had some pretty clear implications: "assemble a contraption" clearly parallels with "cast a spell", so contraptions need to be different from spells in a fundamental way for this to be a meaningful distinction. My assumption was that they'd be cards without mana costs that were just shuffled into the library normally, but the "library" specifically corresponding to magical techniques while contraptions reside in a unique contraption deck has a logic to it. Similarly, the sprocket progression limits contraptions to functioning once every three turns, barring the existence of cards that interact with sprockets—there's gotta be at least one, right?—and this guarantees contraptions operate in a manner that is at least somewhat orthogonal to traditional Magic.

I want to see a more thorough explanation of how contraptions work, how other cards can interact with them, etc. We can infer the basic functions of the engine they've constructed, but we have no evidence of its limits or true capabilities. MORE CARDS. MORE.